Stewart Brand and the biotech trip
--
I’m writing a book on the history of the human potential movement and transhumanism, told through the lens of the Huxley family (Thomas, Aldous and Julian) and their friends. The book argues that the Huxleys were religious prophets, who imagined a future evolutionary religion of expanding human potential. I suggest this religion or worldview, which weaved through the late 19th and 20th centuries, is going to become yet more influential in the era of genomics. And, while generally praising the Huxley crew for their vision, I warn that their culture has a dark side, in its tendency to elitism, spiritual inflation and eugenics.
The last chapter takes us into the present day, and explores the influence of transhumanism in California and Silicon Valley. Each chapter has a lynch-pin figure — either a Huxley or a friend of theirs — and for the final chapter I thought I would make it Peter Thiel, even though he clearly never knew Aldous or Julian Huxley. But I’ve decided that, actually, Stewart Brand is a much better figure to end the book with.
Stewart Brand is a remarkable figure who is best described as a pontifex, someone who connects different scenes and acts as a cultural catalyst. He has also been described as like Zelig or Forrest Gump — at key moments in cultural innovation, he pops up.
Brand did actually meet Aldous Huxley, when he was an undergraduate at Stanford. I don’t have any further details of this meeting (do you?) but Brand says he came away persuaded to major in biology.
He then joined the army, doing parachute jumps in the Airborne division, then afterwards became part of the San Francisco hippy scene.
He was a close friend of LSD icon Ken Kesey, occasionally drove the Merry Pranksters’ bus, and helped to organize the first Trips festival. He brought a technophilia to the acid scene — the invitation to the Trips festival read: ‘Everyone is invited to wear ECSTATIC DRESS & bring their own GADGETS (a. c. outlets will be provided).’
